Detroit, Michigan. Float in the Labor Day parade showing Uncle Sam as a huge blacksmith: photo by Arthur S. Siegel, September 1942

Detroit, Michigan. Murray Local Number Two of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) float in the Labor Day parade illustrating "Wings of the Victory" depending on air power: photo by Arthur S. Siegel, September 1942

Detroit, Michigan. Spectators at the Labor Day parade: photo by Arthur S. Siegel, September 1942

Detroit, Michigan. Float in the Labor Day parade showing relationship between the Army, Red Cross and industrial workers: photo by Arthur S. Siegel, September 1942

Detroit, Michigan. Workers' wives and children watching the Labor Day parade: photo by Arthur S. Siegel, September 1942

Detroit, Michigan. Little girl carrying American flag in the Labor Day parade: photo by Arthur S. Siegel, September 1942

Photos from Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress

Of all these striking photographs, one strikes me the most--the one with Honest Abe, head bent in deep thought, surrounded by the hoi polloi, a lot of them (one would hope) also with heads bent in deep thought.

Vassilis, The humility of Lincoln lost in thought and the disarming smile of the woman beneath and toward the foreground, looking off toward the little girl in striped dress at left -- the most hopeful moment here for me, as well.

(It typifies the dignity and distance in work of John Vachon, a young man from the Midwest who was a file clerk at the Farm Security Administration, when out of the blue someone put a camera in his hands... and he became perhaps the most remarkable of the many great documentary photographers who worked for the FSA in its brief but extraordinarily productive life, from the late Thirties over into the first year of the War -- when historical documentation gave way to propaganda, as the FSA became the Office of War Information.)

And so...there remains Uncle Sam "hammering out a warning" upon the obdurate anvil of thought, in front of Sam's Theatre (it's all in the family), representing the tank armorers.

("Well they not only looked like tanks we called the[m] tanks"-- from The Wit and Wisdom of Ed B.)

The electricians' unionists, on the other hand, seem relatively untroubled by cerebration of any kind, in putting their not-queer shoulders to the task of electrocuting Hitler beneath the sign of Imperial Whiskey.

While researching the post I was put in mind of earlier not-dissimilar searches through the Deutsches Bundesarchiv photo files from the same period, uncovering similar imagery, but of course everything in reverse -- the execution of Mickey Mouse & c.

Anthropology will be anthropology. Boys will be boys. Wars will be wars.